Come all you bright
students so young and so fine
and seek not your fortune way down in the mine.
It will form as a habit, it will seep through your life
and hunting neutrinos causes nothing but strife.

(Chorus) For it's
dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew
where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too
where it takes years to tell if the sun really shines
it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

There's many a
man I've known in my day
who lived just to labor his whole life away
like a fiend with his dope, like a drunkard with his wine
a physicist can lust for the lure of the mine.

(Chorus) For it's
dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew
where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too
where it takes years to tell if the sun really shines
it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

When the textbooks
are written and the ages do pass
It’s the men in the mines proved neutrinos have mass
and though we twisted and strained with all of our might
when it comes to the sun, well--- Bahcall got that right.

(Chorus) For it's
dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew
where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too
we finally know that the sun really shines
it's clear as a Nobel prize, way down in the mine.

About 10 trillion (i.e. 1013)
neutrinos are passing through your hand each second! These sub-atomic
particles are emitted by the sun as part of the nuclear reactions
that produce the sun's light and heat. They interact only very
weakly with matter, which is why you're not aware of all the neutrinos
passing through you. To detect them, physicists have constructed
"neutrino observatories" far underground, where they
are completely shielded from annoyances caused by high-energy
cosmic rays. The neutrinos can easily pass through miles of earth.
However, because there are so very many of them, even a tiny chance
of interaction does result in occasional detectable events, resulting
in a tiny flash of light that registers on an array of photomultiplier
tubes, or in a transmutation of one type of nucleus into another,
which can then be detected chemically.

This song is
about all the physicists who have worked in these underground
observatories, and especially the discovery in 2001 at the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory (SNO) of the solution to the "solar
neutrino problem". Briefly, the number of neutrinos emitted
by the sun appeared to be a factor of 2-3 lower than predicted
by the theory for the nuclear reactions powering the sun; this
theory was championed by John Bahcall (mentioned in the next-to-last
verse). As shown by the SNO experiments, neutrinos can oscillate
from one flavor to another, showing that they have a non-zero
mass. The early observatories could only detect a single flavor,
resulting in the low count. For their roles in the whole history
of neutrino detection, Ray Davis, Jr. and Masotoshi Koshiba received
the Nobel
Prize in 2002, as referred to in the last verse.

Dr. Geesaman (above) performed this song to introduce a distinguished
speaker at the Physics Division atArgonne National
Laboratory on 25 Oct 2002. The speaker wasArt
McDonald of Queen's University, Ontario, and director of
SNO. It had just been announcedthat he had won the
Tom W. Bonner prize of the American Physical Society. Click
here for a video clip of Dr. Geesaman's
performance. (Prof. McDonald was wearing a live mic in preparation
for his talk, and can be heard laughing and singing on the choruses.)

Click here
to purchase the original album for this tune (with lyrics about
coal mining) from amazon.com

Background image: Part
of the Photomultiplier tube array at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
(courtesy of Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)